The Last Spike eBook

When Smith is safe on the other shore we drive the
horses into the stream. They shudder and shrink
from the ice-cold water, but Jaquis and I urge them,
and in they plunge. My, what a struggle!
Their wet feet on the slippery boulders in the bottom
of the stream, the swift current constantly tripping
them—­it was thrilling to see and must have
been agony for the animals.

Midway, where the current was strongest, a mouse-colored
cayuse carrying a tent lost his feet. The turbulent
tide slammed him up on top of a great rock, barely
hidden beneath the water, and he got to his feet like
a cat that has fallen upon the edge of an eave-trough.
Trembling, the cayuse called to Smith, and Smith,
running downstream, called back, urging the animal
to leave the refuge and swim for it. The pack-horse
perched on the rock gazes wistfully at the shore.
The waters, breaking against his resting-place, wash
up to his trembling knees. About him the wild
river roars, and just below leaps over a ten-foot fall
into the Athabasca.

All the other horses, having crossed safely, shake
the water from their dripping sides and begin cropping
the tender grass. We could have heard that horse’s
heart beat if we could have hushed the river’s
roar.

Smith called again, the cayuse turned slightly, and
whether he leaped deliberately or his feet slipped
on the slippery stones, forcing him to leap, we could
not say, but he plunged suddenly into the stream,
uttering a cry that echoed up the canon and over the
river like the cry of a lost soul.

The cruel current caught him, lifted him, and plunged
him over the drop, and he was lost instantly in the
froth and foam of the falls.

Far down, at a bend of the Athabasca, something white
could be seen drifting towards the shore. That
night Smith the Silent made an entry in his little
red book marked “Grand Trunk Pacific,”
and tented under the stars.

THE CURE’S CHRISTMAS GIFT

“A country that is bad or good,
Precisely as your claim pans out;
A land that’s much misunderstood,
Misjudged, maligned and lied about.”

When the pathfinders for the New National Highway
pushed open the side door and peeped through to the
Pacific they not only discovered a short cut to Yokohama,
but opened to the world a new country, revealing the
last remnant of the Last West.

Edmonton is the outfiling point, of course, but Little
Slave Lake is the real gateway to the wilderness.
Here we were to make our first stop (we were merely
exploring), and from this point our first portage was
to the Peace River, at Chinook, where we would get
into touch once more with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Jim Cromwell, the free trader who was in command of
Little Slave, made us welcome, introducing us ensemble
to his friend, a former H.B. factor, to the Yankee
who was looking for a timber limit, to the “Literary
Cuss,” as he called the young man in corduroys
and a wide white hat, who was endeavoring to get past
“tradition,” that has damned this Dominion
both in fiction and in fact for two hundred years,
and do something that had in it the real color of
the country.